A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material which is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever.
1.0 Field of the Invention
This invention relates to capturing a workflow.
2.0 Description of the Related Art
A workflow application typically provides a graphical user interface to provide information to a user and to allow the user to make selections and input data. The graphical user interface comprises windows, which are also referred to as screens. Information is input to the screen and another screen is typically provided based on the inputs.
When testing computer software systems, the test sequence is documented to re-test the software and fix software problems. A user, such as a software tester, manually documents the test. For example, to document a test when testing a workflow application that has various screens, the tester manually copies and pastes the screens into an empty document. The tester also manually highlights certain portions of the text, documents the inputs, supplies comments and provides the workflow sequence. Because a workflow application may produce numerous different screens during a test, the process of manually documenting a test sequence is tedious and time consuming, and therefore expensive. In addition, different testers may document the test in different manners, and the documentation may not be standardized.
Therefore, there is a need for a technique to reduce the cost of testing a software application. This technique should also provide a link between the documentation and the application that was tested. In addition, this technique should allow documentation to be standardized for software testing.